I didn't get home until very late that night. Unlike most libraries, this one was always open – for me, at least. I did apologise to Marissa for keeping her so long, but she shrugged it off and said she was used to me by now. I'd learnt a hell of a lot today, I needed a break to process it all. Turns out runes themselves are mainly used for runecasting, which is different from fortune telling. There is no specific way of 'reversing' a rune once it has been cast. However, you can counteract it with a rune of opposite meaning or a more powerful rune. The trick now was to find that opposite rune.

However, it was far too late now, so I just headed home. Thankfully, there were no interruptions – no attacks, no visits, nothing. Actually, there was very little anything on the streets. Strange.

I unlocked the front door of my apartment and walked inside. It wasn't until the front room I flipped the lights on. Everything looked fine at first, but then I took a closer look around the room.

The first thing I noticed was that my notes had gone. All of them. I left them on my table before I left, and now they were gone. Then I noticed the little things around the room: objects moved, the coffee table up against the wrong wall, the suspicious looking green splats standing out against the pale laminate flooring. Intrigued, I followed these splats.

They took me to my father's room. Uh oh. I picked up the pace a little then, worried. I threw open the door and froze. There was writing on the far wall, splashed over his prized collection of paintings, stretching around to his wardrobe. That was going to be fun to explain when he came home.

Scrawled across the walls in ornate script were the words:

Du kjenner ikke hvem du har å gjøre med.

I ran from the room and started up my laptop. Why did someone have to use a language I didn't know? I quickly typed in what I saw and the translation came up:

You don't know who you're dealing with.

If that wasn't a threat, I didn't know what was. They must have broken in somehow that didn't involve the door, because it was locked when I came in. Unless they had a key? But how could that be? No one had a key to the apartment except for my father and I. There was a spare outside the front door, but the only people who knew about that were… the girls. It wasn't under a flowerpot or the welcome mat like most people's (mainly because there isn't a flower pot or welcome mat), so it's not like anyone could have found it. Unless, of course, the culprit was persistent enough to try all of the bricks outside the door and find the loose one with the key behind it.

No, it had to be someone who knew it was there. I ran my hand over the paint and it came off on my fingers. Still wet. However, it didn't have the usual consistency of paint – it was thicker, and had clumps in it. No professional company sold this sort of stuff. Maybe it was home made? But who has the time to make paint?

Rubbing my eyes, I glanced at me watch. 11:36. It was later than I thought. Sighing, I decided to leave the amateur detective work until the morning. It could wait that long. After changing and running a brush through my hair, I curled up in my room and drifted off to sleep. If only my night could have been restful.

My dream was scattered, the imaged fractured. There was no real plot to it, just random images of people, places, and things I'd never seen before, specifically weapons. There were, however, three that kept reappearing in the visions.

The first was another rune. It looked like an F, but slightly slanted. This kept appearing everywhere: in people's faces, in the sky as clouds, burnt into the ground where a forest once stood. Never was it in the same place twice. It was the most fleeting, never appearing for more than a second. Was this something I was meant to see, or a side effect of whatever was sending me these visions?

The next was a palace. Well, I say palace; city was probably more accurate. It had high spires that were more like tubes. It looked like a giant shell. The palace was made of what seemed to be pure gold – it was gold in colour, at least. The sky behind the palace was a soft blue with pink clouds, giving the impression of a sun just setting. I occasionally saw a person walking around in the strangest of armour; muscle bound men with stern expressions that looked like perfect guards. The armour they wore bared no recognisable insignia. It looked too shiny to be medieval, yet made of too much metal to be anything else. Where was this I was seeing?

The final picture was a man. He was dreadfully pale with high cheekbones and a strong jaw. His eyes were the most vibrant shade of green, his hair the shade of darkest night. The way he walked was more like prowling than walking, as if he were a wild cat stalking his prey. This man too wore the strange armour, but it was clearly of a higher standard than the other men's: It was gold and black, with intricate designs on the chest plate. I kept seeing him in a variety of different places, with many different people, but often he was by himself surrounded by books in some form of a study. He had strings of runes flowing around him, so I assumed he must be very skilled in the old magic. Who was this man? Was he the mastermind behind all of this?

I also saw scenes of a meeting between this man and a smaller figure in a hood. There was no way of telling who this person was, but guessing by the person in the hood's slight stature, they were probably female. Notably, there were angry red runes – primarily one that looked like a line crossed diagonally from right to left – surrounding their being. The runes seemed to swerve nearer to the man whenever they rotated near him. Was he the one who cast the spell? Why did it look so aggressive?

These visions came in stops and starts, coming to me every time I drifted off to sleep. I woke up in a cold sweat every other hour or so. When it reached six thirty, I couldn't take it any more. Sluggishly, I kicked the duvet cover off of my sleepy form and headed into the kitchen.

After getting some breakfast, I went back into my father's room to investigate the mysterious message further. I was disappointed, however. When I entered the room I found it clean, as if the green paint had never been there. Startled, I touched the wall. The words hadn't even been painted over. It was as if they had never been there. Cautiously, I walked back into the rest of the apartment. I noticed the coffee table was back where it had always been, my notes also returned.

What was happening? I picked up my notes and read through them fully. There was green ink crossing out some of my notes and the same ink correcting a few spelling mistakes, but other than that it was exactly as I'd left it. Who would steel my notes and correct the spelling?

I checked what had been crossed out. The part about any Roman demigods being involved was crossed out repeatedly. Was this to say that it was completely absurd, or that I was dead on? Somehow, I thought the former. I don't think someone clever enough to cover up a phantom break in would double bluff like this. Still, I wasn't going to completely disregard the theory.

Also crossed out was Phoebus' name, but that didn't surprise me. I hadn't really suspected him anyway. It was crossed out rather savagely, actually. Maybe this person liked Phoebus as much as I did – which is to say, not at all. They were the only major things crossed out: a few side notes I'd made as they'd come to me had also been crossed out, probably because they weren't related to the text itself.

Sighing, I threw the pieces of paper down on the table once more. I put my head in my hands. Just when I think I'm getting somewhere, something completely unexpected happens. Who ever I'm dealing with, they're right. I have no idea who I'm dealing with.